Monique Wittig famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.
-- Monique Wittig

#Laughter #Effort #Doe
The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes.
-- Monique Wittig

#Struggle #Class #Two
... I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.
-- Monique Wittig

#Fire #Pages #Teeth
The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft.
-- Monique Wittig

#Rough Drafts #Language #Rough
I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and nonpossession.
-- Monique Wittig

#Names #Possession #Refuse
there is no 'feminine writing' ... and one makes a mistake is using and giving currency to this expression.
-- Monique Wittig

#Mistake #Writing #Expression
men are not born with a faculty for the universal and ... women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen by magic, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics.
-- Monique Wittig

#Philosophy #Men #Class
It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that sex creates oppression, or to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside of) society.
-- Monique Wittig

#Sex #Division #Causes
The bearers of fables are very welcome.
-- Monique Wittig

#Fables #Welcome #Myth
The basic agreement between human beings, indeed what makes them human and makes them social, is language.
-- Monique Wittig

#Agreement #Language #Social
Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.
-- Monique Wittig

#Reality #Body #Language
They say that oppression engenders hate. They are heard on all sides crying hate hate.
-- Monique Wittig

#Hate #Sides #Cry
They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what concerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.
-- Monique Wittig

#Reality #Vocabulary #Shapes
I feel a near passion for intelligence at grips with itself and not letting go.
-- Monique Wittig

#Letting Go #Passion #Intelligence
Frankly, [the definition of woman] is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective. 'Woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual, economic systems. Lesbians are not women.
-- Monique Wittig

#Perspective #Definitions #Problem
One is a writer, or one is not.
-- Monique Wittig
Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible
-- Monique Wittig

#Impossible #Oppression #Making Changes
Remember. Or, failing that, invent.
-- Monique Wittig

#Remember #Failing
For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.
-- Monique Wittig

#Sex #Oppression #Oppressed
The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual.
-- Monique Wittig

#Sex #Political #Categories
Today, together, let us repeat as our slogan that all trace of violence must disappear from this earth, then the sun will be honey-colored and music good to hear.
-- Monique Wittig

#Peace #Together #Earth
A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women are a 'natural group' . . . What the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a 'natural group.' A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one . . .
-- Monique Wittig

#Men #Practice #Ideas
It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.
-- Monique Wittig

#War #Literature #Machines

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